Edwin Morgan's Early Concrete Poetry

ELEANOR BELL Experimenting with the Verbivocovisual: Edwin Morgan's Early Concrete Poetry In The Order of Things: An Anthology of Scottish Sound, Pattern and Goncrete Poems, Ken Cockburn and Alec Finlay suggest that with the advent of concrete poetry, 'Scotland connected to an international avant-garde movement in a manner barely conceivable today'. The 'classic phase' of concrete poetry in Scotiand, they note, begins around 1962, and, referencing Stephen Scobie, they point out that it should probably be regarded as an experiment in late modernism in its concerns with 'self-refiexiveness, juxtaposition and simultanism'.^ Some of the chief concerns of concrete poetry were therefore to expand upon the conceptual possibilities of poetry itself, instüling it with a new energy which could then radiate off the page, or the alternative medium on which it was presented. Both Edwin Morgan and Ian Hamilton Finlay were instantly drawn to these contrasts between the word, its verbal utterance and its overaU visual impact (or, as termed in Joyce's Finnegans Wake, its 'verbivocovisual presentements', which the Brazüian Noigandres later picked up on). Although going on to become the form's main pro- ponents within Scotiand, Morgan and Finlay recognised from early on that its Scottish reception most likely be frosty (with Hugh MacDiarmid famously asserting that 'these spatial arrangements of isolated letters and geo- metricaüy placed phrases, etc. have nothing whatever to do with poetry — any more than mud pies can be caüed architecture').^ Both poets nonetheless entered into correspondence with key pioneering practitioners across the globe, and were united in their defence of the potential and legitimacy of the form. As wiU be shown, the participation of Morgan and Finlay in this 'concrete moment' in early 1960s Scotland also helps to illuminate crucial tensions between tradition and modernity (or late modernism) evi- dent within the literary and cultural Zeitgeist of the time. While Morgan and Finlay were drawn to the form for different reasons, the debates around concrete reveal an insightful and detaüed cultural snapshot of the period. Although concrete poetry is often readily dismissed as play, not 'serious' 105 ELEANOR BELL poetry, as wül be shown, for Morgan the move towards concrete was clearly jusdfied and also a liberating in several important respects. One of the distinguishing characterisdcs of Morgan's poetic career has been his self-confessed and-traditionalist approach, and, connected to this, his openness to contemporaneity and significant culttiral and technological shifts. For Morgan, the spadal transformations offered by the sixdes (for example, in design culture, to name just one), offered the potential for a radical revisioning of society. One of the appeals of concrete was therefore the experimentation it offered between linearity and spatiality. This, in Morgan's view, extended to clear parallels within 'life itself, that is, with the world that was radically changing 'outside' the text: The battle between linearity and spatiality which concrete reflects is something that is in life itself and is going to have far-reaching con- sequences . When you enter a very modern newly-designed shop or a large open-plan house you may have feelings of unease, you don't see the familiar signposts and you don't quite know where to go or what to do — this is because the concept of space has taken over and it needs some adjustment on your part . The problem of concrete, then, is not hard to relate if you start to think about it, to changes that are going on in our society. And if it is important that the arts should be sensitive to these movements of thought and movements of perception which affect or are going to affect people's lives, and I certainly think this is part of their function, then concrete poetry has its place. This statement appears in notes prepared for a talk on concrete in the early sixdes. In these papers from his personal archive, Morgan explains that he has not simply 'gone over' to concrete. Rather, he explains, 'to me it is a sideline which I find useful and rewarding for producing certain effects'. One of the most important effects of concrete on its readership or audience, he explains, is its ability to challenge the 'well-known insularity' not only within Scotdsh literary culture, but in the UK more widely: 'The English Channel is a pretty narrow strip of water . but it's remarkable what an effecdve barrier it can be for the passage of ideas'. The experimentadon with form offered by concrete therefore discourages 'laziness and torpor', especially since, 'the majority of English poets since the war have been busy stacking their neat litde bundles of firewood, but they have stopped planting trees'.'* 106 EDWIN MORGAN'S EARLY CONCRETE POETRY For Morgan, concrete poetry therefore offered an appropriate medium for the much-needed transformation of the poetic, at a crucial time: The young painter or sculptor, for example, is working today in an atmosphere of marked creative excitement. This doesn't mean that the assemblages of Rauschenberg or the luminous pictures of John Healey represent the directions art has to take: it is simply that the artist feels himself to be in the midst of a varied and vigorous range of aesthetic activity. The English poet, on the other hand, has been containing himself with a narrowed spectrum in which the tradi- tional looms large and the exploratory has been almost forgotten. Morgan felt that this reluctance towards the exploratory, this antipathy towards experimentation, was too engrained in British, and. by extension. Scottish culture, and this was. of course, one of the key reasons why he was drawn to the experimentation of the Beats in the USA and to developments in concrete poetry as they were emerging in BrazU. Switzerland and Sweden. As I have commented elsewhere, in the early 1960s Morgan was acutely aware of the problematic nature of tradition weighing down on the shoulders of young Scottish poets."^ This is perhaps most famously explored in his article 'The Beatnik in the Kaüyaird' (1962). where he expresses his view that Scottish culture had become too conservative in outlook, too married to the 'ghost of their country's history'.^ On the one hand, Morgan observes, 'intellectuals and reformers, of course, must guard against lashing themselves into a fury over the Kailyaird' unnecessarily, yet, on the other, he maps out the need for Scottish literary criticism to become more attuned to international literary developments, to seek new forms of inspiration with which to energise from within. For Morgan, this moment in the early sixties represents a much-needed turning point, a moment of reflection in Scottish poetry, in which to stake stock and to chaUenge the dominance of the Scottish Literary Renaissance and its focus on synthetic Scots as the primary medium for artistic expression. Instead, as he points out, 'it would seem sensible to preserve an unanguished flexibUity in this matter of language, suiting your diction to your subject, or to the occasion and the audience.' Morgan suggests that there is 'an important place for sentiment and pathos in any Uterature.' yet the main issue, he finds, is that the Scottish Renaissance has become too removed from the world 'out there': 107 ELEANOR BELL It has allowed life, in Scotland and elsewhere, to move on rapidly and ceaselessly in directions it chooses not to penetrate, and the result in i960 is a gap between the literary and the public experi- ence which is surprising and indeed shocking in a country as small as Scotland . Almost no interest has been taken by established writers in Scotland in the postwar literary developments in America and on the continent. Ignorance is not apologized for.^° Whue Morgan's criticism is most often carefully and thoughtfully balanced, some of his early sixties outbursts appear uncharacterisdcally angry by comparison. In this way, Morgan inadvertendy became an important spokesperson for many of the younger generadon of writers and crides who had been feeling increasingly disinvested and excluded from the literary culture at the time. Whue certainly not a lone voice, he is perhaps one of the most eloquent on these matters. Despite his frustradon with the literary scene, Morgan nonetheless managed to critique it from v/ithin rather than rejecdng it outright, as many of his peers were drawn to do, and, looking back on his intervendons it seems that, whether consciously or otherwise, his role was that of intermediary between the overdy angry young writers (including Ian Hamilton Finlay, Alan Jackson, Alex Neish and Alexander Trocchi) and the more established and mainstream writers who they were evidendy kicking against (Hugh MacDiarmid, of course, being the principal figure here)." Many of these tensions were famously brought to a head in 1962 at the International Writers' Conference in Edinburgh. ^^ This was an event that was to have significant historical resonance around the world due to both the sheer volume and international profile of its attendees. The 'Scottish Wridng Today' debates, beld on the second day of the Conference, were particularly scandalous and controversial.^^ Morgan was invited to speak on a panel which included Hugh MacDiarmid and Alexander Trocchi, and subsequently found himself in the cross-fire that ensued between Trocchi's denouncement of the contemporary Scottish literary scene and, by contrast, MacDiarmid's andpathy towards what he dismissed as mere beatnik, naive exuberance.^'* In these debates Morgan was firmly on the side of the anti- traditionaUsts, and took this opportunity to challenge the reluctance towards experimentadon that he found embedded in the Scottish literary scene: 108 EDWIN MORGAN'S EARLY CONCRETE POETRY I think provincial and philistine are two of the words one would certainly have to apply to .what one sees around one at present.

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